The larger walnut cookies were made in children’s muffin pans that she bought at King Arthur.

Stephen Farber arrived all dressed up with a tie. Jane Fuller soon followed. There were none of the usual late arrivals. Bruce Shields had emailed, “I’ll be a no show today. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all.”

Midge and some of her coworkers at the cancer center noticed that some people were not coming in for their cancer treatments because they could not afford transportation. Midge and her coworkers want to create a transportation fund for them. They are exploring possible ways to raise the money including partnering with Fairbanks Museum to present something..

On the more informational side:

Geof Gonter said that a number of schools are going to iWork instead of Office. It is less expensive, and even free on iPads. He asked about people who have had experience with the new iWorks which is now separate applications for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

In my experience they work quite well in the iOS version on the iPad, but the new Pages is still in beta form on the Mac with some bugs and with low ratings on the App Store. For example I had to import a template from the older Pages which already had a blank second page to add the second page to this document. I now have it saved including the second page as a template. After that the additional new pages to grow automatically.

Geof said the web based Office 365 is free for schools and includes Word, and Excel in the cloud. He said they cannot cut and paste from Office 365 into email when using the Safari or Google Chrome browsers, but the schools can by using the FireFox browser. He said you cannot cut and paste from Windows Office 365 into email when using the Windows Explorer browser.

Midge is wondering if she should get something new that would be smaller than her 15 inch MacBook to take to meetings for taking notes. She asked about an iPad verses a Mini, but she also might consider an 11 or 13 inch MacBook Air. Geof said that a 16 gig iPad or Mini is enough for people who are not application hounds, otherwise he recommends 32 gigs. There was some discussion of prices and screen sizes, but this information is easily available with more information for comparisons on the Apple site or in your favorite Apple store.

Midge wondered if the screen would be large enough if she bought a smaller laptop to replace her 15 inch model. I told her that at home I connect my 13” laptop to a larger not very expensive ViewSonic screen with good results. In answer to a question from Stephen, I said you can display separate images on each screen and slide them back and forth between screens.

In answer to a question from Midge, Kelly said said that if she did not have an iPhone already she would go for an iPhone 5 instead of a Mini, but she has an iPhone already so she would like the Mini. She said it costs her about $130 a month for the iPhone plus a cheaper phone for Geof.

Someone brought up the shocking sight of the bogus signing for the blind while Obama was speaking at the ceremony for Mandela. Geof said he was shocked that the person could be standing that close to the President. Someone else commented that, not only was he a fake, he had a criminal record.

Geof told us there is an ASLpro.com web site where you can learn sign language. I looked at a dictionary on the site. It was fun to see videos of how to sign different words. Kelly said we should see the cutest video of children singing sign language songs. I Googled for sign language songs and it worked. I believe this might be the one she was referring to: control click on this URL or cut and paste it into you browser’s URL